suckow

A lot of items exist on the Challenger and Columbia accidents on the Net. On the document side of things, collecting is going to be a matter of sorting through too much rather than having very little. As Columbia occurred recently, much of the news reporting was done on the Internet as well as print and television media and a surprising amount of it is still out there. Space enthusiasts have maintained an interest in Challenger and since they tend to be fairly tech-savvy, a great deal of documents in regards to Challenger have been digitized and placed here and there on the Net over the years. Not all of which has remained, unfortunately.

There is also an interesting subset of personal musings out there, about which I am of two minds about including. Both accidents have generated a number of hoaxes and conspiracy theories. I would like to include them as cultural artifacts as they say something about how people have responded to the accidents at the time and since. However, some relating to Columbia are anti-Semitic, because of the presence of an Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, aboard the mission. There may also be some similar problems with Challenger and I just have not found them yet. I do not want to condone or appear to condone such views in any way, but they are a response to the disaster and I think the bad should be remembered along with the good.

I was very impressed with the 9/11 site (http://911digital archive.org) and would like to do something similar. It does a very good job of combining and balancing the collection of personal artifacts (stories, images, etc) and documents while making the two sides seem like parts of a whole rather than segregated areas. I would like to do a project rather like that, including both document and personal sides, and if possible multimedia collections as well. Probably a bit ambitious for a first try, but I’d rather fail while daring greatly.
Topicwise, I would like to do it on the Challenger and Columbia accidents. The Challenger accident is my first memory of a nationally significant event and as a space enthusiast pretty much ever since, Columbia hit hard. So, it is a topic of both personal and historical interest. Challenger particularly hit the nation in a strong way, it was the first time the U.S. had lost a crew in flight. The presence of Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, heightened the media and national interest at the time and since. There is a collecting site for Challenger by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), but it is in rather bad shape. A number of the links are dead, including the one which led to personal stories. Columbia is still fairly recent in memory, and like 9/11, a lot of people created tribute images and multimedia in response to the accident. None of this has been centralized and some may have been lost already. The Columbia accident also had a rather widespread effect, the accident took place over land and many people in the Southwest, especially Texas, saw the accident as it happened, wound up with debris literally in their backyard, or helped search for debris. There are a lot of personal stories out there which are not collected and the memory at this point would still be fairly fresh.